The Prettiest Feathers

by John Philpin

He laughed. “Wants to discuss my intentions regarding you, I suppose.”

  “No, it’s nothing like that.”

  “Well, I don’t mind telling him. I have important plans for you, Sarah Sinclair.”

  I felt the heat rise in my face.

  “So what does he want?” John asked, returning to the topic of Robert.

  “There was a shooting in the alley across the street a couple of days ago—two guys shot dead. I think they’re the same ones who came into the shop that day you were here.”

  “I see.”

  “I told Robert about it—about how you got rid of them by showing them your gun. He wants to see if you remember anything I didn’t.”

  “Okay.”

  “Would you mind calling him?”

  “Certainly I’ll call him. What’s the number?”

  I gave it to him, thinking how odd it felt bringing those two men, my past and my future, together.

  “Oh, there’s one other thing,” I said. “The other day you mentioned a psychiatrist—the one you went to see when you were going through your divorce. Dr. Street?”

  “Streeter,” he said. “You aren’t looking for a shrink, are you? I wouldn’t recommend him. Besides, you can always talk to me.”

  E and R. What a big difference two little letters can make. It explained everything.

  As soon as I awakened on the eleventh (which—since I had taken the day off—wasn’t very early), I phoned Robert at his office. My purpose, without being obvious about it, was to confirm what time he would be visiting Liza’s grave. I didn’t want our paths to cross. I didn’t mention that I, too, would be going to the cemetery. For all I knew, I would chicken out, and I didn’t want Robert giving me grief about it. Since the day of the burial, he’d been trying to get me to go out there.

  “You owe it to her,” he had said. Not: “It’ll do you good.” He made it a responsibility, a requirement—implying that my refusal to go was proof of my failure as a mother; proof that I was the one who killed her. If I didn’t go through with the birthday visit, I didn’t want him to have that knowledge, that weapon.

  “Sinclair,” he said when he picked up his phone.

  “Ditto,” I said.

  “Thanks for calling me back so soon.”

  I glanced down at my answering machine and, for the first time, saw the message light blinking. I’d had the bell turned off, so I didn’t know that any calls had come in while I was sleeping. I decided to let Robert go on thinking that I was returning his call.

  “What’s up?” I asked.

  “I wanted to thank you for passing my message along to your friend. I also thought I ought to let you know that he doesn’t really live in Landgrove.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean he’s playing a game with you, Sarah. The story he gave you and the story I got don’t match.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “You figure it out. Maybe he’s married. I don’t know.”

  “You always expect the worst from people. He happens to be divorced.”

  “Look,” Robert said, “his lies are between you and him. Let him set the story straight.” “That’s what I love about you.” “What?”

  “You drop hints. Get me interested. Then tell me to go fuck myself. You never change, do you, Robert?”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. After a pause, he added, “You know what today is.”

  “Yes …”

  “And you know how it gets to me.”

  “Are you going over to see her?”

  “Yeah. In a few minutes.”

  “Give her my love.”

  “Right.”

  After a long silence, I said, “Well, I’ve gotta run.”

  “Me, too.”

  Then I remembered. “Oh, wait. There’s something I keep forgetting to tell you. Remember that woman we were talking about—the one in the cemetery, who was murdered?”

  “Maxine Harris.”

  “Yes. She came in the shop once with some used books she wanted to sell. Harry bought a couple, but there was one that was too beat up to put on the shelves. I bought it from her.”

  “How do you know it was Maxine Harris?”

  “I was reading the book just the other night. There’s a sticker on the inside front cover with her name written on it.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “It’s a collection of Rimbaud’s work. I don’t know how helpful that is, but at least you know she had good taste in poetry.”

  “Rambo’s a poet?”

  I remembered all over again how far apart Robert and I are in our tastes. His idea of great literature is Soldier of Fortune magazine.

  “It looks like she used the book a lot. There’s one section that she highlighted in yellow. I’ll show it to you the next time you’re out at the house.”

  “Is that an invitation?”

  I paused for a moment, considering my options. I knew if I said no, I’d be contradicting my willingness to show him the book. And if I said yes, it might sound like I was offering more than I really was.

  “Take it any way you want,” I said.

  John

  I presented my papers to the desk sergeant at the precinct house, a ruddy-faced cop waiting for his heart attack to happen. He glanced at me and made a call.

  Sinclair was there in less than two minutes, a reasonable time for a city employee to keep a courier from the British embassy waiting.

  “Alan Carver,” I announced, extending my hand.

  “I was expecting John Wolf,” Sinclair said, shaking my hand.

  “The undersecretary is in Washington,” I told him. “He asked me to deliver this package to you, and to be prepared to answer any questions you might have. I’m sure you can appreciate the delicate nature of the situation.”

  “Of course,” Sinclair said, as he accepted the small parcel bearing the seal of the United Kingdom.

  The detective escorted me to a conference room on the same floor. It was a large room, sparsely furnished with a single, chipped Formica table and three vinyl chairs. He sat. I remained standing. He read.

  “I think you’ll find the information complete. The weapon in question is there—all the necessary papers. The undersecretary does acknowledge his indiscretion, and apologizes. He asked me to assure you that his moving about your city without the proper escort will not happen again.”

  Sinclair was nodding. He examined the .32 caliber revolver, the license, and the gun’s registration certificate. “This all appears to be in order,” he said. “Mr. Wolf’s letter contains most of the information I need, but—”

  “He has briefed me thoroughly, Detective,” I said, and waited.

  Sinclair scanned the letter again. “His purpose for being in that neighborhood—”

  “The undersecretary is an antiquarian book collector. As you can see, the book he purchased that day is included in the package.”

  Sinclair flipped through the pages of The Swiss Family Robinson. He was thinking. In the reality I had shaped for him, he would know that this call was a courtesy, that John Wolf was insulated by diplomatic immunity. He also knew that it was a dead kid’s birthday, and he had a grave to visit. He couldn’t waste the whole day sparring with an absent undersecretary.

  “Were you planning to take this material back with you?” he asked.

  “On the contrary,” I said. “We wish to be of assistance, just not involved. When you have finished with it, please leave a message at the embassy for me. I’ll return and pick it up.”

  I handed him Alan Carver’s card. He stared at it.

  “The night of the shooting,” he began.

  I nodded at the letter.

  “He was at a reception with the mayor?” Sinclair asked.

  “Easily and, I hope, discreetly verified,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  I glanced at my Rolex. “If there’s nothing more,” I said.

  “I’ll check all this out,” he said, standing. “
I’ll probably have some questions later.”

  The man was seething.

  I’ve always been a collector of other people’s business cards. With the cards, plus the information I glean from my computer, and an occasional visit to a bank, convention, or embassy, I’ve been able to assume whatever identities I’ve needed. I’ve also educated myself so that I can step into a man’s professional life and live it, passably, for as long as I wish.

  Later, as I drove toward the cemetery to meet Sarah, I knew that her ex-husband would be tied up for the next several days in bureaucracy, on both the local and the international level. The embassy would accept a message for their courier, Mr. Carver, but they wouldn’t tell Sinclair that Alan Carver was on holiday with his wife in the British Virgin Islands.

  Nor would they tell him that they had no undersecretary named John Wolf. They would assume, as they had when I called, that he wanted to speak with Jeremy Wolf, and they would provide him with the number at his office in Washington. When I called that number, I was politely given a telephone appointment for the middle of November, nearly a month away—an expedited time frame because I had claimed to be an investigator for the Department of the Treasury with an urgent need for information.

  The mayor’s office will tell Sinclair that there was no official guest list for the reception. And, if he dealt with the same public information officer I did, she will say, “Your Mr. Wolf probably was there. Both senators were present, and they had twenty or thirty UN types with them. We just don’t have a list.”

  I parked beside Sarah’s car at the gate and walked up to meet her at the cemetery office as we had agreed. She stood outside, her light blue dress moving slightly in the breeze. She was holding a small bunch of cut flowers.

  “At least the day is beautiful,” I said.

  She had a map of the place with Liza’s grave marked on it. She glanced at it as we walked up to the top of the hill.

  The setting was sterile, barren of trees. There were no statues or headstones. Each grave was marked by a flat bronze plate resting in a slab of concrete. We were in the section reserved for children—the Garden of Enchantment.

  “I think she’s over this way,” Sarah said, consulting her map.

  When she found the grave, she removed a metal canister from the head of the marker and placed the flowers inside it, then put the canister back in its holder.

  I was waiting for her to start in about Liza’s short life, Sarah’s own role as mother, how Robert did or didn’t fit into things. Instead, she knelt and bowed her head. If she prayed, she did it silently. It occurred to me that perhaps the mother should join the daughter. It wasn’t just a poetic whim, and it wouldn’t have been mere replication. It’s just that the opportunity had presented itself. There was a slag pile off to one side of the Garden of Enchantment where a shovel was stuck in a heap of dirt. It would have been so easy to peel back the sod on Liza’s grave, dig a shallow hole, make a small contribution to the slag pile, deposit Sarah atop her daughter’s casket, and replace the sod. Who would think to look for the missing among the buried dead?

  It would have been so easy. I stepped closer to Sarah’s back as she continued to kneel. Swallows swooped in low arcs across the hill—splashes of orange and white against the pastel blue of the sky. The day was clear, the top of the hill empty. It would have been a simple matter of reaching out my hands and doing it.

  But I had something else in mind for Sarah.

  When she stood, she turned and explored my eyes.

  “The color changes,” she said.

  “Others have told me that.”

  “They’re doing it right now. They were gray. Now they’re almost blue.”

  She was finished at the grave. There were no tears.

  “I feel as if I could never really know you,” she said. “Usually a person’s eyes will tell me something, but all yours do is change.”

  “Doesn’t that tell you something?” I asked.

  As we began walking down the hill, she said, “You aren’t who you said you are.”

  “Oh?”

  “Even the name—John Wolf—you made that up, didn’t you? And the way you handled that gun—what are you, CIA or something?”

  Not a bad guess. This was the kind of perceptiveness I had expected from Sarah—the side of her that provided the challenge.

  “John, or whatever your name is, who are you?”

  “John is right,” I told her, offering my business card.

  “John Wallingford,” she read aloud. “Wallingford Antiques, Landgrove. Antiques? Then what is all the mystery about?”

  “I hope I don’t sound pretentious when I say this, but I am a wealthy man,” I explained. “I do most of my business in cash. That’s the reason for the gun. I never had to aim it at anyone before that day in your store, but I’m well schooled in its use, thanks to the range I visit twice a week.”

  “But why the phony name?”

  “I wanted you to like me for myself, not my money.” I could see her relax.

  “I’m sorry I made you feel so nervous,” I told her.

  After continuing for a while in that sympathetic vein, answering her questions, I said, “I assume it was fear that made you lie to me about where you live.”

  “How did you know that? That I lied, I mean.”

  “It was a point in your favor, actually,” I said. “You’re a lousy actress.”

  “Okay,” she admitted. “Maybe I was a little bit afraid.”

  “Well, let’s have no more of that. I would like to take you out to see Wallingford Manor. We can have dinner, then I’ll bring you back to the city to any address you wish.”

  Sarah laughed. Then she told me her address, and we agreed that I would pick her up at 7:00 on Sunday.

  When we reached her car she turned and lingered, as if she expected me to kiss her or hold her. A wave of revulsion surged through me.

  “Sunday then,” I said.

  Sarah

  When I arrived home, I noticed Robert’s car parked down the street. He must have been waiting for me because he pulled into the drive behind me.

  “What’s up?” I asked when he followed me up onto the front porch.

  “What do you mean?”

  “Why were you parked over there?” I asked, pointing down the block.

  He looked away. “I don’t know. Just a hunch.”

  “What?”

  “Why don’t we go inside? I could use some coffee.”

  I unlocked the front door, then stepped aside to let him enter. He headed straight for the kitchen, trailing fumes of beer. He immediately went about the business of preparing two mugs of instant coffee.

  Handing one of the mugs to me, he said, “The mayor’s assistant is an old friend of mine. I talked her into faxing me the guest list from a party he had the night of the shootings.”

  I sat down at the kitchen table.

  “I suppose you have a reason for telling me that,” I said.

  “Something just didn’t ring true about your Mr. Wolf. I had a gut feeling that something was wrong.”

  “You always think something’s wrong.”

  “Listen, Sarah, your undersecretary or ambassador or whatever the hell he says he is, is a fake.”

  “Robert, please start at the beginning.”

  “John Wolf. The guy who pulled the gun on those goons in the shop that day. He’s not who he says he is. And he wasn’t where he said he was when they got shot.”

  I laughed. “I already know that John Wolf isn’t John Wolf. He’s John Wallingford. Rich. Divorced. An antiques dealer.”

  “Jesus. What the hell’s going on here?”

  “He said his name was John Wolf, then he said it wasn’t. It’s Wallingford.”

  “Shit.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  “I didn’t even run this guy’s gun registration to make sure it was legitimate. I’m losing it.”

  “What’s the big deal? He used a fake name. So what?�
�

  “So what?” Robert hadn’t raised his voice like that with me for a long time. “A guy tells you one thing one minute, then another the next, and you keep on seeing him? The guy’s a psycho. Wake up and smell the Maxwell House.”

  “I’m sick of your drunken tirades,” I said. “I divorced them, remember? Why don’t you get the hell out of here?”

  He reached out, as if to touch me, but I pulled away.

  “I mean it,” I said. “I’m tired of going to war with you every time we talk. John Wallingford is the best thing that has happened to me in years, and I don’t want you spoiling it.”

  “I’m warning you, Sarah. There’s something really wrong here.”

  “You’re jealous.”

  Robert hit the table with his fist, causing the coffee mugs to jump. “I’m a cop. He’s a liar. There was a double homicide. I think I’ve got a right to be concerned. This guy is bad news. I don’t want him hanging around here.”

  “He’s not exactly hanging around, Robert. I’ve seen him only a couple of times.”

  “I need to talk to him.”

  “You already did that.”

  “No. He sent some gofer over to the office with a bullshit story about the mayor’s party. That, and a copy of The Swiss Family Robinson.”

  The Swiss Family Robinson? I didn’t know what Robert was talking about, but his reference to a book made me think of Rimbaud.

  “I suppose you want that book I bought from Maxine Harris,” I said.

  Robert seemed to shift from drunk to sober. “Right,” he agreed. “I’d like to take a look at that.”

  “You can even take it with you—if you promise to return it when the investigation is over.”

  With Robert following, I went into the living room to get the Rimbaud paperback off the coffee table.

  “Gee, that’s funny,” I said, staring at the empty spot where the book had been just a few hours earlier. “It’s not here.”

  Robert gave me a sideways glance.

  “No, really,” I said. “It was here when I left this morning.”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “This is weird.”

  “If you want company, Sarah, just come out and say it. You don’t have to play games to get me to come over.”